Each time I walk by the Westhampton Lake on my way to class or dinner, I am always amazed to see the natural beauty that resides on our campus. Humans have always had a connection with nature. Recently, I have noticed more and more people having close to no link to the natural world around them. I believe that technology has pulled us further from the world that is currently around us and that most people have lost their sense of direction and place. Many people that attend U of R walk around this lake every day and have no connection to it what so ever. Several of your friends have commented about how dirty the lake is and it often makes me wonder if they have ever taken an environmental science class or a geography class ever in their life. My guess would be no, because if they had they would realize that the poor water quality can be directly linked to everyday actions of humans around the lake.
During class on Wednesday, we walked around the lake and talked about the different inputs into the lake. Many people do not know that there are two inputs into the Westhampton Lake. Another unknown for people is that a lot of the water that comes into the lake is from run off from impervious surfaces. This means the humans are directly changing the health of the water before it runs off the land. The take away message from observing the lake would be that every little action affects something bigger. In the case of the Westhampton Lake, if we clean up water here it will run into the James River. This cleaner input into the James will eventually help the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay. The same could be said if we pollute our small lake, not only will it be dirty on our campus, but we will be doing no favors for the Chesapeake Bay. This is why the University of Richmond is taking huge steps to improve the water quality of our lake. These changes will impact the water quality further down the line.
Erin, I thought you might be interested to know that today in my environmental class we learned that the lake itself is actually truly healthy (I was just as adamant about it’s dirty nature as you were). What I see as the ‘dirty’ part is all the plant debris that litter the banks and stiller spots of water and that is what I would assume many people see when they call the lake dirty or polluted. Perhaps we (Earth Lodge) could spend an evening one day and clean up what we can from the lake to try and create a prettier looking lake so people can stop calling this healthy lake ‘dirty’.
Good idea Samuel. Meeps could help out. She’s an old hand at cleaning up the lake: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151670678452070.1073741830.9081422069&type=1